Cory Doctorow's craphound.comhttp://craphound.com
Cory Doctorow's Literary WorksFri, 27 Feb 2015 09:49:46 +0000en-UShourly1Internet-fired elections and the politics of business as usualhttp://craphound.com/articles/2015/02/27/internet-fired-elections-and-the-politics-of-business-as-usual/
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I’ve got a new Guardian column, Internet-era politics means safe seats are a thing of the past, which analyzes the trajectory of Internet-fuelled election campaigning since Howard Dean, and takes hope in the launch of I’ll Vote Green If You Do.

The Obama campaigns went further. Building on the Dean campaign, two successive Obama campaigns raised millions in small-money donations, creating purpose-built Facebook-like social networks and using them to recruit highly connected supporters to work their way through their social graphs, contacting friends and friends-of-friends to pitch them on donating and voting.

But both times, Obama took office and immediately shut down these grassroots networks. The Obama governance style is big on closed-door, back-room horse-trading – Obama came out of Chicago Democratic Machine politics, after all – and this is fundamentally incompatible with having a bunch of true believers running around waving the flag, making categorical statements about which compromises are (and are not) acceptable.

Governing in tandem with a grassroots is a hard problem. The best example we have of this is the Tea Party, which, despite the big-money backers who bankrolled it, is composed of people who are genuinely passionate about politics and are serious about insisting that the politicians they backed act in accord with their principles.

Leaving aside my political differences with the Tea Party, it’s fair to say that this has been a mixed bag for Republican lawmakers, whose caucus has been responsible for a congressional deadlock that’s run on for years, so that it’s become normal for vital US governmental agencies to shut down and send everyone home until a budget can be passed.

When you let regulators and politicians bully you into excluding the public from their own institutions, alienating the public that you need on your side to stave off the next round of cuts — and the next.

In the story of market-driven public institutions, it’s we, the public, who are the angel investors. We paid to keep the archives growing, to put a roof over the museum, to amass and catalogue all of our nation’s cultural treasures (and the treasures of many other nations). The internet now makes it possible for those institutions to reach wider audiences than ever before, at lower costs than ever before – once their collections are digitised. When Siemens or another big company comes along to digitise our investments, they are the VCs putting in late-stage capital after we’ve borne all the risks, sometimes for centuries. If our management team – led by David Cameron, the self-styled MD of UK plc – offers these investor-come-latelies the lion’s share of the equity (that is, access to those treasures) for their paltry, late-stage capital, then he is in gross dereliction of his duty to us, the shareholders.

But of course, this is a stupid story. We don’t invest in public service institutions because we want them to be profitable. We invest in them because we want them to be good. Galleries, museums, archives and libraries tell us who we are. Schools and hospitals tend our minds and bodies. They are not businesses. We are not shareholders.

We have private archives, private schools, private healthcare, and private libraries. They cream off the easiest, most profitable, least onerous part of the public service remit. As austerity tightens and market logic crushes our institutions, many have become private/public hybrids, charging for some of their services, or selling off some of their treasures, or forcing the public to fit within the metrics demanded by the zealots of UK plc.

This is suicide. There is no amount of capitulation that will save your institution. If your archive charges the public to access its own memories, who will argue to keep it funded when the next round of cuts comes along? People who can’t afford to pay for your archive won’t stand up for it. People who can afford to pay for archival services already have private firms to serve them – why would they vote for their tax money to support another for-pay service?

Warren Ellis called it “just far enough ahead of the game to give you that authentic chill of the future, and close enough to home for us to know that he’s talking about where we live as well as where we’re going to live; a connected world full of disconnected people. One of whom is about to lobotomise himself through the nostril with a pencil. Funny as hell and sharp as steel.”

As with my other books, Audible refuses to carry this title because I won’t allow them to use DRM on it. You can get it at Downpour, where all audiobooks are DRM-free. I’d really appreciate it if you’d share this with your audiobook-loving friends and encourage them to vote with their wallets for businesses that let artists choose whether their works should be locked down with DRM.

I was delighted and honored to find that my stories “Petard” (from Twelve Tomorrows) and “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (from Hieroglyph) (excerpt) made the cut (both have also been selected for several of this year’s Year’s Best anthos, for which I am extremely grateful!).

For me, the publication of the Locus List always marks the day when I fill in my Hugo nominations ballot, using it to jostle my memory and figure out which works I want to put forward. If you’re interested in my own eligible works, they’re the two stories above (best novelette and novella, respectively), “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free” (best related work) and “In Real Life” (with Jen Wang) (best graphic novel).

And no, it’s not on Audible, because they refuse to carry my books unless I let them put DRM on them.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to live through a bioweapon attack or to have every aspect of your life governed by invisible ants? In Cory Doctorow’s collection of novellas, he wields his formidable experience in technology and computing to give us mind-bending sci-fi tales that explore the possibilities of information technology—and its various uses—run amok.

“Anda’s Game” is a spin on the bizarre new phenomenon of “cyber sweatshops”, in which people are paid very low wages to play online games all day in order to generate in-game wealth, which can be converted into actual money. Another tale tells of the heroic exploits of “sysadmins”—systems administrators—as they defend the cyberworld, and hence the world at large, from worms and bioweapons. And yes, there is a story about zombies too.

There are two small policy interventions that would make a huge differ­ence to the balance of commercial power in the arts, while safeguarding human rights and civil liberties.

1. Reform DRM law.

It should never be a crime to:

* Report a vulnerability in a DRM;

* Remove DRM to accomplish a lawful purpose.

With this simple reform, DRM would no longer turn our devices into long-lived reservoirs of pathogens (because bugs could be reported as soon as they were discovered), and would no longer give the whip-hand over publishing to tech companies (because re­moving DRM to do something legal, like moving a book between two different readers, would be likewise legal).

2. Reform intermediary liability.

* The DMCA “safe harbor” should require submission of evidence that the identified works are indeed infringing;

* If you file a DMCA takedown notice that ma­terially misrepresents the facts as you know them or should have known them, you should be liable to stiff, exemplary statutory damages, with both the intermediary and the creator of the censored work having a cause of action against you, and with the courts having the power to award costs to the victims’ lawyers.

By ensuring a minimum standard of care for censorship demands, and penalties for abuse, the practice of carelessly sending millions of slop­pily compiled takedowns would be stopped dead (last year, Fox perjured itself and had copies of my novel Homeland removed from sites that were authorized to host them, because it couldn’t be bothered to distinguish my novel from its TV show). Likewise, penalties for abuse with a loser-pays system of fees would give the victims of malicious censorship attempts grounds for punishing the wrongdoers who make a mockery of out the copyright holder’s toolkit to silence their opponents.

But so long as we’re making a wish-list, here’s the big policy change that would make all this stuff much less fraught: STOP APPLYING COPYRIGHT TO ANYONE EXCEPT THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY.

Doctorow draws two bright lines connecting copyright law to other major issues: government surveillance, as shared by Edward Snowden; censorship by private companies; and the necessity of free expression to civil and human rights.

Copyright claims are often used as a silencing tactic, where a party with power issues a takedown claim to get content from a party with less power removed from the internet.

For example, Doctorow cites copyright takedown notices issued by police departments demanding to have videos of their officers committing illegal acts taken down on the grounds that the police, not the person with an iPhone who recorded them, have copyright on the videos. Or takedown notices issued by the Church of Scientology to have removed articles from opponents who used leaked internal documents to criticize the organization.

“There are almost never penalties for abusing the takedown process,” Doctorow notes. “It’s the measure of first resort for rich and powerful people and companies who are threatened by online disclosures of corruption and misdeeds.”

Likewise, intermediary companies become gatekeepers of what end users may and may not consume — because they don’t want to get sued. So they fall into the “notice and takedown” scheme, and pass it all along to you. And that includes possibly having your entire broadband connection throttled or hijacked if a copyright holder doesn’t like what a user of that connection has been doing.

Because they have the right, and the ability, to keep an eye on you if you’re anywhere in the ecosystem: using a computer, phone, or internet connection that you didn’t build out of string yourself.

I sat down for an interview with the RiYL podcast (MP3) at NYCC last fall. We covered a lot of material that I don’t get a lot of chances to talk about, particularly the relationship between personal politics and big-P politics. Listening to it again, I’m very satisfied with how it turned out.

It’s that time again! School is out, but I’m still working, so the kid came to the office with me, just in time to record a new podcast. This year, Poesy performs a stirring rendition of Jingle Bells, with dirty words!

In sharply argued, fast-moving chapters, Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free takes on the state of copyright and creative success in the digital age. Can small artists still thrive in the Internet era? Can giant record labels avoid alienating their audiences? This is a book about the pitfalls and the opportunities that creative industries (and individuals) are confronting today — about how the old models have failed or found new footing, and about what might soon replace them.

An essential read for anyone with a stake in the future of the arts, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free offers a vivid guide to the ways creativity and the Internet interact today, and to what might be coming next.

]]>http://craphound.com/news/2014/12/19/listen-wil-wheaton-reads-information-doesnt-want-to-be-free/feed/0Interview with Radio New Zealand’s This Way Uphttp://craphound.com/news/2014/12/18/interview-with-radio-new-zealands-this-way-up/
http://craphound.com/news/2014/12/18/interview-with-radio-new-zealands-this-way-up/#commentsFri, 19 Dec 2014 06:10:13 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=5404
Radio New Zealand National’s This Way Up recorded this interview with me, which airs tomorrow (Saturday), about my book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free (MP3).
]]>http://craphound.com/news/2014/12/18/interview-with-radio-new-zealands-this-way-up/feed/0Interview with The Command Line podcasthttp://craphound.com/news/2014/12/13/interview-with-the-command-line-podcast-2/
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I just appeared on the Command Line podcast (MP3) to talk about Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free — Thomas and I really had a wide-ranging and excellent conversation:

In this episode, I interview Cory Doctorow about his latest book, “Information Doesn’t Want to be Free: Laws for the Internet Age.” If you are interested in learning more about the topics we discuss and that that book covers, you can also check out books by the scholars we mention: Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle and William Patry. I compared Cory’s book to “The Indie Band Survival Guide” the authors of which are friends of the show whom I have also interviewed.

The audiobook version of the book is already available. Check Cory’s site, the free download and electronic editions should be available soon.

]]>http://craphound.com/news/2014/12/13/interview-with-the-command-line-podcast-2/feed/0Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: the audiobook, read by Wil Wheaton (if you were to share this, I’d consider it a personal favor!)http://craphound.com/news/2014/12/10/information-doesnt-want-to-be-free-the-audiobook-read-by-wil-wheaton-if-you-were-to-share-this-id-consider-it-a-personal-favor/
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I’ve independently produced an audiobook edition of my nonfiction book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, paying Wil Wheaton to narrate it (he did such a great job on the Homeland audiobook, with a mixdown by the wonderful John Taylor Williams, and bed-music from Amanda Palmer and Dresden Dolls.

Both Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman contributed forewords to this one, and Wil reads them, too (of course). I could not be happier with how it came out. My sincere thanks to Wil, the Skyboat Media people (Cassandra and Gabrielle de Cuir and Stefan Rudnicki), John Taylor Williams, and to Amanda for the music.

The book is $15, is DRM free, and has no EULA — you don’t need to give up any of your rights to buy it. It should be available in Downpour and other DRM-free outlets soon, but, of course, it won’t be in Itunes or Audible, because both companies insist that you use DRM with your works, and I don’t use DRM (for reasons that this book goes to some length to explain).

Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, read by Wil Wheaton
With introductions by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer.

In sharply argued, fast-moving chapters, Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free takes on the state of copyright and creative success in the digital age. Can small artists still thrive in the Internet era? Can giant record labels avoid alienating their audiences? This is a book about the pitfalls and the opportunities that creative industries (and individuals) are confronting today — about how the old models have failed or found new footing, and about what might soon replace them.

An essential read for anyone with a stake in the future of the arts, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free offers a vivid guide to the ways creativity and the Internet interact today, and to what might be coming next.

Here’s a scene from Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s acclaimed documentary on Edward Snowden, showing Snowden packing his bags to leave Hong Kong, showing the book on his nightstand: my novel Homeland.

I literally could not be more proud than I am right now. Thanks to Poitras and her helper, Maria, for this clip.

]]>http://craphound.com/homeland/2014/12/02/when-ed-snowden-met-marcus-yallow/feed/2Why should we care about characters?http://craphound.com/news/2014/12/01/why-should-we-care-about-characters/
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I appear in the latest edition of the Writing Excuses podcast (MP3), recorded live at Westercon in Salt Lake City last summer, with Mary Robinette Kowal, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells and Howard Tayler, talking about why we care about characters.
]]>http://craphound.com/news/2014/12/01/why-should-we-care-about-characters/feed/1Little Brother middle school English curriculum materialshttp://craphound.com/littlebrother/2014/11/21/little-brother-middle-school-english-curriculum-materials/
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James Scot Brodie is a teacher at Presidio Middle School in San Francisco, where Jen Wang and I spoke last month on our tour for In Real Life; prior to my arriving, he assigned my book Little Brother to his students, and produced some curricular materials that he’s generously given to me to publish.

I was thrilled when the librarian announced that Cory Doctorow was going to make an appearance at our school. As an English teacher, aspiring writer, and complete nerd — I find author visits a nice perk to the job. The students too, like to get out of the classroom whenever they can and author visits are a rare treat. I’ve been teaching for about five years and I’ve met two authors. It then dawned on me that we seldom read the books of the authors that come to visit our school. Mainly because our closets are filled with tons of dead people. Maybe five percent of our class sets are from the living, although Mr. Gomez somehow scored 40 copies of The Fault In Our Stars (he must know someone).

Nevertheless, it was early September and Doctorow was set to visit on October 16. I was determined to have my students read the book, but we only had ten copies from a box on loan from the public library. Now, Doctorow is super generous with his stuff and offers a lot of material to educators and students for free via his website, so I figured I would tap into this and download the book. At the same time I didn’t want to print up 102 copies for my 3 English classes. That would take forever, cost a lot, and kill too many trees. So, long story short, this is what I did: I purchased the audio book, and two copies of the text. I read the book, making “marginal” and underlining vocabulary words, slowly sculpting it into a “teacher’s edition.” I also came up with questions for each chapter. Most the questions are simple guided questions (who, what, when, where and why), but I also made sure that each chapter has a question where the students can relate the reading to their own lives — these inquiries were also great springboards for interesting classroom discussions. I printed up these sheets and students completed them as we listened to the audio book. This is where the second book comes into play – I used the unmarked version of the text to display on the white board at the front of the class via my ELMO projector for all the class to see. I was surprised at how huge I could get the book — it was roughly four feet by six feet and I didn’t know this but the little orange button on the left is for focusing (a student pointed this out to me). I’ll have to say it was one of the most positive reading experiences I’ve ever had with a class. It may be psychological but the minute I projected the book on the board and hit the play button on the audio book — students were enthralled as if watching a movie. Of course it may also have something to do with Mr. Doctorow’s book — there is a lot in there that the modern day teenager can relate to.

The entire unit took about six weeks. Students gathered all their vocabulary/question sheets into a portfolio. I purchased card stock and brass fasteners for students to make covers for these portfolios (which they decorated themselves) and this turned out to be a great boon for students that couldn’t afford to purchase their own copies of the book, because when the big day came — Doctorow autographed copies for his admirers. And this is how the lesson plan ended up here, Cory signed a few, thought they were cool and offered to post them. There are a couple of other activities that I’ve thrown in, but the above is the real meat and potatoes. Use them as you like, put your own personal spin on them and hopefully it will save you some time.

]]>http://craphound.com/news/2014/11/20/wide-ranging-conversation-with-portlands-kboo-about-information-doesnt-want-to-be-free/feed/0Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free interview with Baltimore morning radiohttp://craphound.com/news/2014/11/17/information-doesnt-want-to-be-free-interview-with-baltimore-morning-radio/
http://craphound.com/news/2014/11/17/information-doesnt-want-to-be-free-interview-with-baltimore-morning-radio/#commentsTue, 18 Nov 2014 04:41:02 +0000http://craphound.com/?p=5367I’m heading to Ann Arbor, DC and Baltimore this week for a series of talks — I did a a quick interview with Baltimore’s WYPR (MP3) that came out very well!
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